EBay's stock price moved to an eight-year high Thursday after its fourth-quarter revenue topped analysts' estimates, helped by record holiday sales on the Web and mobile devices.

Shares in the San Jose operator of the world's largest online marketplace rose 2.4 percent to $54.17 Thursday, reaching $54.89 earlier in the day for the highest intraday price since January 2005.

Sales climbed 18 percent to $3.99 billion, the company said late Wednesday. That exceeded the $3.98 billion that analysts had expected.

The results suggest that Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe is sustaining a turnaround effort that began in March 2008, when he succeeded Meg Whitman, now CEO of Hewlett-Packard. The company has been pushing to generate more revenue from people shopping on tablets and smartphones, and from retailers who use eBay to sell their merchandise. That has resulted in 14 straight quarters of sales growth, and a 75 percent rally in the stock price since Donahoe took the helm.

"The legacy marketplaces business - it's kind of carried into mobile," said Bill Smead of Smead Capital Management Inc. in Seattle. "You get involved with bidding or selling something on eBay, and it's nice to carry around the device where you're doing that with you."

On Cyber Monday in November, at the beginning of last year's holiday shopping season, transactions on eBay's mobile applications more than doubled from the year before, while its PayPal mobile-payment volume almost tripled. EBay charges a fee for each item sold, and for each PayPal transaction.

"U.S. sales volume not coming from eBay Motors is the metric everyone focuses on," said Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc. "It's the best indication of the health of the core business in the U.S."

Fourth-quarter profit fell to $751 million (57 cents per share) from $1.98 billion ($1.51) a year earlier, when eBay sold the remainder of its stake in Skype to Microsoft. Profit before certain items was 70 cents per share, matching projections.

Donahoe said he's continuing his efforts to make sure users are buying on smartphones and tablets as well as through eBay's website.

Mobile users tend to complete purchases more often than those browsing on desktop computers, and mobile garners a quarter of new customers, drawing younger shoppers to the site, he said. EBay's acquisition of credit card scanning company Card.io last year will further that goal, because the technology makes it easier for new users to sign up, he said.

"Picture by the end of this year, you download the eBay or PayPal mobile app, you take a picture of your driver's license, and you take a picture of your credit card, and that's registering," Donahoe said in an interview.

Mobile volume

First-quarter revenue will be $3.65 billion to $3.75 billion, eBay said, compared with an average analyst projection of $3.8 billion. The company forecast profit, excluding some items, of 60 to 62 cents per share, versus a 64-cent estimate. EBay's mobile payment volume will exceed $20 billion in 2013, as will PayPal's, the company said.